PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

The fact that I exist and have an idea in me of a perfect entity – that is, God – conclusivelyentails that God does in fact exist.All that’s left is to explain how I have gotten my idea of God from Him. I have not taken itin through my senses; it has never come to me unexpectedly as the ideas of sensible things dowhen those things affect (or seem to affect) my external organs of sense. Nor have I made theidea myself; I can’t subtract from it or add to it. The only other possibility is that the idea isinnate in me, like my idea of myself. 9Descartes’s proof for both the existence of God and the existence of the human subject, aswe have seen, inaugurates modern philosophy’s attempted reconciliation of the real and therepresented; or, within the history of Western thought, the resolution of Plato’s realm of theForms with the realm of sensible things. Unlike the newly formed modern world of Descartes,the postmodern world is marked by the failure to recuperate the fragments of ruin, to reunitethe subject and the world; we cannot help but to notice, after revisiting Descartes, ourpostmodern whirlpool and the absence of a sacred center that is indicative of our age. 10 Topull us further away from the transcendent and closer to a postmodern condition, we havebefore us the impossiblity of certainty of any kind, and the universality of human subjectivity.Within this postmodern condition there is silence from the Sphinx, and we are left, likeMahfouz’s Omar, wondering what, if anything, it meant to be possessed by universality. In theparalogical network of postmodernism, neither the sacred nor the universal human subjectremain intact. The sacred is in ruins and the possessed and possessing subjects are diffusedacross the plane of language and uncertainties. Our postmodern uncertainty, which leads toanxiety concerning meaning and value, delivers us over to, and not from, the concept ofparasacrality.35PARASACRALITY: PAGUS/POLISIt is this quixotic fantasy of returning to the sacred and the eternal foundation of Westerncivilization that begins our current postmodern quest. Since the sacred has failed us, we nowsearch for the para/sacred, or that which finds a place around or alongside that of the sacredor the residue of an alternate power and an alternate ultimacy we cannot yet name. Theparasacred of postmodernity continues from the frayed end(s) of a modernist aestheticrevealed in an artistic, historical, philosophical, political, or religious process of synthesis. Itis a synthesizing process marked by multiple and unsynthesizable beginnings and endingswhich spontaneously occur as incisions, tears, or punctures in the external limiting surface oflanguage. Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” attends to this unweaving of language:The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a webthat envelops a web, undoing the web of centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitelyregenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace [la trace coupante], the decision ofeach reading [la décision de chaque lecture]. 11Such an incision, tear, or puncture is an arbitrary wounding of the discursive tissue indicatingthe incorrigibility of language’s depth, its ideational boundaries, the directional signs marking